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On the Wall: What's in the galleries this week

Howard Podeswa at Koffler Gallery, a tribute to On Kawara and Ron Shuebrook at Olga Korper

Eric Doeringer's July 10, 2014 (from the Today series), a date painting based on the exhaustive series Today by seminal conceptual artist On Kawara, who painted some 3,000 pieces bearing the date on which they were painted. Doeringer, whose practice is a self-conscious aping of conceptual superstars, inserts himself into the canon with a work that bears the date of Kawara's death. (James Limit Studio / Courtesy Clint Roenisch Gallery)

Howard Podeswa's enormous painting Hell, one of the main events at his exhibition A Brief History, opening Jan. 14 at the Koffler Gallery. (Toni Hafkenscheid / Courtesy Howard Podeswa)

Ron Shuebrook's DSCPS (cobalt & red), 2015, part of the artist's new show at the Olga Korper Gallery. (Courtesy Olga Korper Gallery)

Howard Podeswa: A Brief History: A major mid-career exhibition for any painter, one might think, would include a couple of dozen canvases at minimum. But for Podeswa at the Koffler Gallery, the main event consists of just two: Heaven and Hell. It helps, of course, that they contain universes. Two vast tableaux of light and darkness, respectively, they are nonetheless as opposite as one could hope. In Hell, Podeswa bundles up recent social anxieties in a wash of menacing imagery — mob scenes, police cars, a demonic presence — in dark obscurity; in Heaven, a pale skrim of paint offers only peepholes through which to view small snippets of the paradise that may lie beyond. There are several smaller accompanying pieces — most studies for the main event — but this is Podeswa’s magnum opus and well worth your time. Opens Jan. 14, 6 to 9 p.m. at the Koffler Gallery, 180 Shaw St. On Until March 27.

Elsewhere: Starting Tuesday night, Brett Despotovich’s Afterhours Projects presents Channel, a five-night series of stripped-down performances that match the live-and-in-person with the mediated experience of video. At Katzman Contemporary, 86 Miller St., Tuesday to Saturday, 7 p.m. See http://www.afterhoursprojects.com/ for more information.

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Ongoing

Here Not Here: On Kawara and Eric Doeringer: Beginning in the 1960s, the conceptual artist On Kawara devoted his practice to marking the inexorable slippage of time. Dozens of identical postcards time-stamped with the hour he rose each day, or a 20-volume book project in which the artist records every known date from 998,031 B.C. onwards into the future, to 1,001,992 A.D. But perhaps his best-known works are from his Today series, in which the artist executed nearly 3,000 paintings bearing only the date on which they were painted. The series was meant to end with his death and so it did on July 10, 2014, at 81. Kawara not being available to mark the occasion, Roenisch presents the next best thing: a date painting of that very day by Eric Doeringer, a renowned bootlegger of famous artworks with a particular taste for conceptualism’s heady disconnects. Equal parts homage and critique, it seems a fitting finale, once removed. At Clint Roenisch Gallery, 190 St. Helens Ave, until Jan. 23.

Ron Shuebrook 2016: Shuebrook, who is 72, is an eminence grise of Canadian abstract painting and drawing, to which he has been devoted for the better part of 40 years. His current show marks something of a departure, or maybe a return. Since the late ’90s, Shuebrook has worked mostly within the constraints of black and white, whether in his architecturally precise paintings or more dynamic drawing work. Here, bold colours — ochre, lime green, crimson or maroon — shoulder up next to those restrained works, inflecting both with subtle questions about an artist’s decision-making process, and particularly the notion that none is necessarily correct. At Olga Korper Gallery, 17 Morrow Ave, until Feb. 8.

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